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Perhaps the most important twentieth-century building in Oxford, St Catherine’s College was designed by the influential Scandinavian architect Arne Jacobsen (1902-1971). He took as his model the thirteenth-century New College, which had combined all the functions of a College within a single plan. But he updated it – and not just by employing an explicitly modernist style.
Placed between the hall and the warden’s lodgings, next to a bell tower and cloisters, surrounded by accommodation and near to a library, the single largest space in New College was the chapel. At St Catz, by contrast, there was no chapel. Next to a bell tower can be found a large lecture room and library: the secular equivalent of a place of worship.
St Catherine’s, founded in 1962, is typical of twentieth-century Oxford Colleges in eschewing overt religious commitment. In that sense, it marks a sharp contrast with its predecessors and with the post-war universities founded in Britain, almost all of which built places of worship. Intriguingly, it remains the case, of course, that St Catz is named after a Christian saint.
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